In what follows, still other possible routes which have
not yet been explored at all, and thus have not been discussed in the
literature, will be brought to bear on the question of transmission routes in
particular. The reason why no one had ever thought of these routes before, in
my opinion, has to do with our widely held contentions about the nature of
intellectual life during the European Renaissance and the assumption of the
almost complete autonomous growth of modern science from that period on (with
the sole exception of a possible relationship of Renaissance science to the
Classical Greek heritage). In specific, it will be demonstrated that
the various collections of Arabic manuscripts still preserved in European
libraries contain enough evidence to cast doubt on this autonomous nature of
Renaissance science -- at least as far as astronomy is concerned -- and to
shed light on a new chapter regarding the mobility of scientific ideas
between the Islamic world and Renaissance Europe.

This evidence will demonstrate that there was no need for
texts to be fully "translated" from Arabic into Latin, in the same
fashion that was done in the earlier Middle Ages, in order for Copernicus and
his contemporaries to make use of the contents of those Arabic manuscripts.
It will specifically show that there were competent astronomers and
scientists who were contemporaries of Copernicus, slightly earlier than him,
or immediately following him, who could read the original Arabic sources and
make their contents known to their students and colleagues, in the same
environment where Copernicus was attempting to reformulate the mathematical
foundations of Greek astronomy. The situation was apparently not too
different from the situation the Greek Byzantine scientist found himself in
towards the beginning of the fourteenth century where he could report back
into Greek what he found in Arabic and Persian scientific texts and thus blur
the borders between "Greek" science and "Arabic/Islamic"
science. Or shouldn’t late Greek Byzantine science be called
"Greek" science?

Looked at from the perspective of blurred borders, and
from the perspective of the other border "separating" the Islamic
world from Renaissance Europe, one has to ask if there is an appropriate term
to characterize the resulting science that is produced under such conditions,
where manuscripts carrying theorems first articulated in Arabic texts were
"translated" into Byzantine Greek and finally organically employed
in Latin, whether such a science was the science of the Islamic world, the
Greek Byzantine world, or the world of Renaissance Europe? One need not
exaggerate in order to highlight the predicament imposed by such terminology.

Had the problem been limited to the appearance of two
mathematical theorems first in Arabic texts and then in the works of
Copernicus one could have dismissed them still, against better judgement, and thought of them as a localized and limited
"transmission", in a complex sense of the word, taking place by
sheer happenstance or by sheer circuitous routes via Byzantine Greek as
history sometimes offers such examples. With that approach one may even
successfully avoid thinking of the larger implications that such evidence
presents for the intellectual climate in Europe
during the latter part of the fifteenth-century and throughout the sixteenth
and even after. But when coupled with the much more abundant similarities
between the astronomical works of Copernicus and the works of the earlier
Damascene astronomer by the name of Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375),16 so competently
documented by Swerdlow in his edition and
translation of Copernicus’s Commentariolus,17 or when coupled with
the similar phenomena in medicine18 and mathematics, to give only two
examples from other disciplines, then the evidence begins to beg for a much
more detailed explanation, and our traditional methods of referring to sheer
coincidences and independent discoveries or even cultural sciences begin to
fail.

To elaborate, consider in this context the complete
identity of the Copernican model for the moon with that of Ibn al-Shatir, (slides 15&16), or the remarkable
similarities in their models for the motion of Mercury, (slides 17&18), both heavily
documented in the literature by Neugebauer and Swerdlow. Or consider again, in fields other than
astronomy, the appearance of the description of the pulmonary movement of the
blood first in an Arabic text of the Damascene physician Ibn
al-Nafis (d. 1288) (slides 19&20), who lived around the
same period as the astronomers who produced the two mathematical theorems
mentioned above and whose medical text was written before 1241, and the later
appearance of the same description of the pulmonary circulation of the blood
in the works of Michael Servetus (1511- 1553) and Realdo
Colombo (1510-1559), both sixteenth-century contemporaries of Copernicus. In
the same context, recall too that Harvey, to whom the discovery of the
circulation of the blood is attributed, graduated from the university of Padua
in northern Italy
whose medical faculty had included among its members, about a century
earlier, the distinguished Venetian physician by the name of Andreas Alpagos (d. 1520). This Andrea had spent close to
30 years in Damascus
as the physician of the Venetian consulate towards the latter part of the
fifteenth and early part of the sixteenth centuries. While in Damascus he learnt
Arabic enough to re-translate the philosophical and medical works of Avicenna
as well as the same medical work of Ibn al-Nafis where the pulmonary motion of the blood is
mentioned. The copy of Andreas’s translation
which still exists at BolognaUniversity, however,
does not seem to include the section on the pulmonary circulation of the
blood.

In mathematics, consider the concept of the decimal
fractions, attributed to Stevin (around 1600), and the existence of such
fractions in Arabic mathematical works from as early as the tenth century (slides 21&22). In the same field also
consider the debate in the sixteenth century in various European localities
about the then relatively new field of Algebra and its possible Arabic
origins as illustrated most recently by Giovanna Cifoletti.19

Or in the field of scientific instruments, consider again
the curious copy of an Arabic astrolabe (slides
23&24) originally made in ninth-century Baghdad and then copied on a
draft paper during the first quarter of the sixteenth century by Antonio de
Sangallo the Younger (d. c. 1525), who was also one of the architects of
Saint Peter’s cathedral in Rome.20

When all that evidence is brought to the table one should
at least be impressed by the ubiquitous nature of these instances that create
problems for those who continue to think of science in cultural terms or
would prefer to class all those problems as transmission problems. The implications
of those problems for the analytical categories assumed in the cultural
sciences are undeniably radical, to say the least.

18. For medicine see the work of
Ibn al-Nafis and its
possible transmission to Europe during the
same period. A.Z. Iskandar, "Ibn al-Nafis", Dictionary
of Scientific Biography, Scribner’s Sons, NY,
1974, vol. 9, pp. 602-606.

19. For the extensive debates
during the sixteenth century about the Arabic origin of Algebra and possible
relationships between Arabic and Latin Algebra see the most recent work of
Giovanna Cifoletti, "The Creation for the
History of Algebra in the Sixteenth Century," in Mathematical Europe,
éditions de la Maison des
sciences de l’home, Paris, 1996, pp. 122-142.

20. For a full publication
discussing this astrolabe copy, see G. Saliba, "A Sixteenth-Century
Drawing of an Astrolabe Made by KhafifGhulam ‘Ali b. ‘Isa (c.850
A.D.)," Nuncius, AnnalidiStoriadellaScienza, 1991,
6:109-119.